Greetings from the Land of Enchantment

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Strange Dreams

I'm not good at new year's resolutions. I put them off until the 6th or 7th of the month usually, just let myself have a few days to take it all in. This year, the new moon came two weeks into the new year and it gave me an opportunity to experience a second chance--already! Since then I've had a couple of strange dreams:

The first was less a dream than a thought that came to me in those waking hours--just between asleep and the alarm going off. It was the thought that I had somehow passed the test. The test of what you ask? Well, that's the strange part. I woke up thinking about life and its never-ending quest to repeat itself. The insatiable appetite for living things to replicate, create. We as animals are driven by it and to it for the better part of our lives. Its what dictates much of our behavior for the better part of 30 years or more. And yet as humans, we've freed ourselves in some way from the compulsion of reproduction. That doesn't mean that we don't reproduce, of course, most humans do. But there are many who don't. There are those who've sought a life of contemplation instead. And there are those who wasted their youth and waited too long. Either way, the compulsion, the driving narrative of the average life was averted. My desire to replicate myself in a child, to have my identity continued into the future must come through consciousness, through meditation, through reputation, through the gifts I leave behind. There will be no toe-headed, blue eyed girls running around with clefts in their chins--at least not my own. So what do I carry forward? What mark will I make? That's for history to decide.

The second dream was actually a dream and it was exhilarating. The one I hold in my heart was in the dream but the dream wasn't about him. Instead, it was as though I were a child again (even though I wasn't--but that was the feeling) and I was running through a field shouting, "I've never been happier in all my life", over and over again--and he was just watching me, bemused. I woke up with a thrilling feeling. I imagine it must be how my mother wakes up everyday--with her unmatched zeal for life. As a fairly melancholic character, it was new territory for me. But it felt great. It felt liberating to be so happy, so free, so in love with life.

So perhaps that second dream will be my belated new year's resolution. Perhaps I will simply be happy and love my life. Perhaps I'll resolve to be exhilarated--at least once a day. Sounds like a plan.

May your resolutions be resolutemay they fulfill your highest destinymay you thrill upon awakeningand may you run like a child againshouting for joy.May you love and in that loving find the good within yourselfand may that good flowerand unfold--like magic.